In Past Show

About Richard Butler

Best known as the founder and singer-songwriter of the British rock band, The Psychedelic Furs (founded 1977), Richard Butler also paints. With his daughter as his muse, he produces expressionistic portraits of pensive female subjects, who serve as ciphers for himself. As he describes, “In a way I think all of my paintings are self-portraits in that, though the face I am painting may not be my own, the feeling I get back from the painting is certainly an important element of my own psyche.” Focused on the material qualities of his medium, Butler smudges, distorts, and overlays patterns onto his models’ faces, creating dynamic compositions at once naturalistic and hallucinatory.

British, b. 1956, Hampton Court, United Kingdom, based in New York, New York